POLITICS
The permanent secretaries are preparing to demonstrate their permanence
BORIS JOHNSON
So confident is Tony Blair of obtaining power in the next 18 months that he is already demanding tuition in how to run the country. In what is described as an unprecedented move, a group of ex-perma- nent secretaries has volunteered to give the Shadow Cabinet a series of seminars enti- tled 'The Hardware and Software of State: Whitehall under a Future Labour Govern- ment'. Guided by Sir Nicholas Monck, for- merly Michael Portillo's permanent secre- tary at the Department of Employment, Blair will learn the tricks of his most wily opponents. These are not the putative Tory Opposition. Of course not.
No, Sir Nicholas will be telling Blair and- Cco. how to foil the mandarinate. Look down the list of the permanent secretaries, by now bristling with knighthoods bestowed by the grateful Tories. These are men who will have known nothing but a Conservative administration for 18 years. For nigh on two decades they will have been preparing and executing government policy, on every- thing from privatisation to opting-out of schools. By all normal laws of human nature, they should have become politically acculturated: if not Thatcherised, then at least Torified.
Imagine, purely for the sake of illustrat- ing their state of mind, that a great national newspaper was about to undergo a parallel convulsion. Suppose that a change of cor- porate governance was at hand, after a decade or more in which the agenda and style have been relatively clear. For the senior executives who will be asked to implement the revolution, there is only one question that really matters. Among the Sir Humphreys of the op-ed department, the alpha minds of the leader-writers' desk, and among the purring Rolls-Royces of the fea- tures and news departments, the issue is one of survival.
What, they will be asking themselves, are my chances of hanging on to my slightly ridiculous title and my chauffeur-driven car? They hear some of their colleagues talk longingly of 'geysers of blood', and they wonder whether their faces will suit the political disposition of the new regime. And so it is in Whitehall. Some senior Labour Party figures have already promised that 'there will be no bloodbath'. There again, there are those in the Labour movement who smack their lips at the prospect of vendetta. At Lord Wilson's funeral, Lady Falk- ender was seen to grab Tony Blair, point at the Cabinet Secretary and head of the Home Civil Service, Sir Robin Butler, and say, 'That is the kind of man you have got to get rid of.' As with newspaper offices, memories in Whitehall go back with a shudder to the last change of government. For the first six months of Lady Thatcher's tenure, a kind of truce prevailed. Then it became clear to the Treasury mandarins, who had helped preside over this country's most lamentable post-war economic perfof- mance, that they had a phenomenon on their hands.
Sir Douglas Wass, the Permanent Secre- tary to the Treasury, was to be heard at din- ner parties in 1980 saying things like, `We're all Keynesians here, but we've done our best to follow the government line'; and, 'We're doing our best, but we don't think it will work.' For this geyoreish talk, he was unsurprisingly punished by the pro- motion of an outsider, an academic economist called Terence Burns, to cut the ground from beneath him. Well, what future now under Blair for Sir Terry, the man who was at the very epicentre of Thatcherite economics?
I inquired of some very, very senior civil servants, and the view is that 'Teflon Tel' will be fine. A man, after all, who can sur- vive the complete implosion of government economic policy on 16 September 1992, can probably survive a mere change of govern- ment. And indeed, so will all these man- darins, apparently, be fine. Andrew Turn- bull, the perm sec at the Department of the Environment and vaguely thought of as a Thatcherite, recently gave a paper at the Civil Service College at Sunningdale on `The Impact of Government Policies' in which, perhaps with a trace of cunning, he moaned about the 'Underclass'. Hayden Phillips, the socially ubiquitous and shotgun-toting perm sec at the Department of National Heritage, is even touted as Labour's successor to Sir Robin (who is due to retire, regardless of Lady Falkender's Black Spot). As one Labour MP close to Blair has put it, 'We're all very fond of Hayden.' Partly this prospect of survival is assisted by the immense flex- ibility of the species. I remember being shocked, in 1992, by the fluidity with which certain Foreign Office wallahs began to trim their analysis of Britain's position in Europe to suit their percep- tion, supported by the polls, that Neil Kinnock was about to become the next prime minister.
Mainly, though, there will be no blood- bath in Whitehall because no great intellec- tual sacrifices will be demanded. It will not require a huge mental contortion to con- vert from Majorism to Blairism. For those at the Department of Education it will be painful to see the end of opting-out. But testing, the National Curriculum, and other advances will remain; as will privatisation and almost every other Tory improvement. As for 'new' Labour's policy on 'Europe', the issue which Malcolm Rifkind last week called the new fault line in British politics, officials admit there may be some tempo- rary embarrassment.
One week, Mr Stephen Wall, our man in Brussels, will be bashing the foreigners furi- ously, and refusing to accept the slightest expansion of Qualified Majority Voting in the intergovernmental conference. The next week, after the election, he will sud- denly announce to his counterparts that Britain has not the slightest compunction about giving up the veto, But as one For- eign Office man puts it, 'That won't matter, as long as they understand the way we're playing it.'
That is the kind of breezy machiavellian- ism which has assured and will assure the success of the British bureaucrat. Indeed, in spite of these seminars being offered to Blair by turncoat ex-perm secs, it is one of the consolations for those contemplating a Labour government, that the senior civil servants will continue, at least for a while, to run the show. If only the same were true for newspapers.
Boris Johnson is assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph.
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